II: The Meaning of “Being”

Being, the First Division of Hegel's Logic, in terms of
the theory of cognition, is the first stage in the process by
which people arrive at knowledge of the world.

In the study of philosophy, Being always denotes the "historical
context" - the whole social, technical, cultural, political
context in which the philosophy arises, and its position within
that context.

When we say that the Logic is also a theory of the development
of science and culture on the historical scale, we should make
the proviso that it should not be used (as it tended to be by
Hegel) as a straitjacket into which the real history of thought
must be squeezed. Nevertheless, this aspect of the Logic
brings out in especially clear form that each stage of the Logic
is a self-sufficient and valid world-outlook ["a systematic
whole of thought-terms", Shorter Logic §86n].
The Logic works out the basis of each outlook, its inner
contradiction and where it leads to. Thus, the Logic also
provides an approach to understanding different personalities,
different viewpoints and political or social tendencies and methods
which co-exist within a given situation.

In the history of philosophy the different stages of the logical
idea assume the shape of successive systems, each based on a particular
definition of the Absolute. As the logical Idea is seen to unfold
itself in a process from the abstract to the concrete, so in the
history of philosophy the earliest systems are the most abstract,
and thus at the same time the poorest. The relation too of the
earlier to the later systems of philosophy is much like the relation
of the corresponding stages of the logical Idea: in other words,
the earlier are preserved in the later: but subordinated and submerged.
Shorter Logic §86n].

Being - Notion - Idea

The philosophy of Being is first of all "awareness".
In this century it is the point of view expressed by, for example,
Krishnamurti, and is strongly present in the martial arts; among
the popular applied psychologists "active listening"
closely expresses the standpoint of Being. It is also called seriality
- "one damn thing after another".

Pure Being is the world an instant before you see it, it is the
world through the eyes of a new born baby. Like the Zen teaching
that demands of the devotee absolute awareness, absolute "thoughtlessness",
it is, for consciousness, an unattainable moment - even though
it is equally the beginning of all consciousness!

In the words of Jean Piaget:

"at first the universe consists in mobile and plastic perceptual
images centred about personal activity. But it itself-evident
that to the extent that this activity is undifferentiated from
the things it constantly assimilates to itself, it remains unaware
of its own subjectivity; the external world therefore begins by
being confused with the sensations of a self unaware of itself,
before the two factors become detached from one another and are
organised correlatively" [The Construction of Reality
in the Child, Conclusion]

As Hegel says, there is absolutely nothing you can say about being
without in doing so "further determining" it, without
putting in place of pure Being some particular, some finite, an
example. Being is absolutely featureless, or rather does not yetshow any feature. Thus, as Hegel says "Being is Nothing"
[§86n],
, a discovery which impels us forward, to the necessity
of further determination, to recognise things, to discover what
lies behind Being.

Such reflection is only possible because we are natural human
beings, with material brains, sense organs and material needs
founded in Nature, in other words because we are part of
Being, products of Nature. Further, every act of reflection or
recognition, every determination, pre-supposes that we already
have in our heads some concept, or Notion. These concepts (Notions)
are social products acquired over millennia and passed on to individuals
through society. In other words, Being becomes only because we
are also not of the world, because we have separated ourselves
from the world and are its Other.

The Notion is the concept we have of the world - the Other of
the world. It is abstract in the sense that each Notion corresponds
to but one aspect of the world, just as each moment of Being,
each event, passing impression or statistic, is abstract, meaningless
and disconnected.

However, the Notion, as a summing up of millennia of human practice,
in comparison to the way Being comes before us as "one damn
thing after another", is rich and concrete.

Abstraction, therefore, is a sundering of the concrete and an
isolating of its determinations; through it only single properties
and moments are seized; for its product must contain what it is
itself. But the difference between this individuality of its products
and the Notion's individuality is that, in the former, the individual
as content and the universal as form are distinct from one another
- just because the former is not present as absolute form, as
the Notion itself, or the latter is not present as the totality
of form. However this more detailed consideration shows that the
abstract product itself is a unity of the individual content and
abstract universality, and is, therefore, a concrete - and the
opposite of what it aims to be. [The Science of Logic, The Notion In General]

In its development the Notion becomes more and more concrete,
like the theory of chemistry which, once having established the
Notion of a molecule as the smallest unit of chemical substance,
builds up a more and more concrete picture of the molecule, with
its atomic composition, its asymmetrical structure, is weak and
strong bonds, associations, hydrogen radicals, carbon rings, ability
to dissociate, etc., etc..

The development of Being however, is just the passing of one aspect
after another, one fact or statistic or mental picture after another
without mutual contact or effect; Being is like a diary as compared
to a real autobiography, like things appear when you have no idea
about what's going on. Each moment passes away and is replaced
by another. But in its development, Being accumulates the "factual
material" which is to form the basis of reflection and the
formation of conceptual knowledge.

As one thing passes after another, certain qualities demonstrate
some stability and fix themselves in our attention, we are able
to measure things and perceive the ebb and flow of quantities
and how one quality passes over into another at a certain point.

Between the development of Being and the development of the Notion
lies the development of Essence, which begins when we think we
recognise something, with an hypothesis, and goes through a contradictory
development in which one thesis is contradicted by another and
overcome by it, until an adequate notion of the thing is arrived
at.

But in Being, we still have just "one damn thing after another".

The Subdivisions of Being
Quality - Quantity - Measure

The Subdivisions of Being are Quality, Quantity and Measure. Hegel
says:

Quality is, in the first place, the character identical with being:
so identical that a thing ceases to be what it is, if it loses
its quality. Quantity, on the contrary, is the character external
to being, and does not affect the being at all. Thus, e.g. a house
remains what it is, whether it be greater or smaller; and red
remains red, whether it be brighter or darker. Measure, the third
grade of being, which is the unity of the first two, is a qualitative
quantity. [Shorter Logic, §85n]

The first determination of Pure Being comes we when notice some
property of the thing which is relatively persistent or stable,
a quality; we also notice other qualities, and Being comes to
us as a series of properties passing one after another. Further
determination shows that a certain quality is in greater or lesser
quantity; our representation is deepened by quality differentiated
quantitatively within itself. Further determination brings us
to notice the point at which quantitative change becomes qualitative
change, when further quantitative change in a quality constitutes
a qualitative change. Thus qualitative relation is reflected in
quantitative relation. Measure is this unity of quality and quantity;
qualitative change which is identical with quantitative change.

The movement of Being is this dialectic of quantity and quality.
It is this passage of a quantity beyond its limits which throws
forward the new quality and provides the motive force of contradictions
which arise in the process of reflection.

Engels popularised this dialectic as the "second law of dialectics"
in his article Dialectics published with Dialectics
of Nature, the first being the Law of the Unity (Interpenetration)
of Opposites, and third being the Law of the Negation of the Negation.
Subsequently, it has frequently been used to introduce the idea
of dialectics for novices.

With What must Science Begin?

The essay, With What must Science Begin?, with which Hegel
introduces Book I of the Science of Logic is a stunning
demonstration of the dialectical method:

... there is nothing, nothing in heaven, or in nature or in mind
or anywhere else which does not equally contain both immediacy
and mediation, so that these two determinations reveal themselves
to be unseparated and inseparable and the opposition between them
to be a nullity. [With What must Science Begin?, continued ...]

Being is the immediate, that is, un-mediated, given in itself
and not by means of something else, in a round about way. But
right from the outset, Hegel makes it clear that "neither
in Heaven nor on Earth" is there anything that is not equally
mediated as immediate. "Being is immediate" is not an
absolute, but a relative truth. To elevate it into an absolute
(like the ancients and like the gurus of "awareness")
is one relative moment or stage of the Absolute Idea.

Against the method of (supposedly) beginning a science with arbitrary,
unproven definitions and axioms, Hegel asserts that it is in the
elaboration of the science itself that its nature is clarified,
and can only be so. The demand of the pedant: "Define your
terms!" is shown to be as empty as the supposed elaboration
of a science (like geometry) from unproven axioms that have been
plucked from who knows where. The subject must be allowed to speak
for itself.

II. That thing is said to be FINITE IN ITS KIND (in suo genere
finita) which can be limited by another thing of the same
kind. etc., etc. [Ethics]

Instead Hegel identifies the real beginning of the science:
in Being, in Being in which subject and object are indissolubly
immersed together, from which reflection emerges from the realisation
that Being is Nothing, from absolute awareness which is also absolute
unconsciousness.

Thus the beginning must be an absolute, or what is synonymous
here, an abstract beginning; and so it may not suppose anything,
must not be mediated by anything nor have a ground; rather it
is to be itself the ground of the entire science. Consequently,
it must be purely and simply an immediacy, or rather merely immediacy
itself. Just as it cannot possess any determination relatively
to anything else, so too it cannot contain within itself any determination,
any content; for any such would be a distinguishing and an inter-relationship
of distinct moments, and consequently a mediation. The beginning
therefore is pure being.
[Science of Logic, With what Must Science Begin?]

We should compare this beginning with Marx's beginning of political
economy, as explained in the German Ideology [1845]:

The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas,
but real premises from which abstraction can be made only in the
imagination. They are the real individuals, their activity and
the material conditions under which they live, both those which
they find already existing and those produced by their activity.
These premises can thus be verified in a purely empirical way.

The first premise of human history is, of course, the existence
of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established
is the physical organisation of these individuals and their consequent
relation to the rest of nature. Of course, we cannot here go into
either the actual physical nature of man, or into the natural
conditions in which man finds himself geological, orohydrographical,
climatic and so on. The writing of history always sets out from
these natural bases and their modification in the course of history
through the action of people. [First Premises of Materialist
Method, Marx]

Here Hegel demonstrates this method in relation to his subject,
Logic. The logical category of Being cannot be further determined
or it is no longer "Being", but something else, some
determination of Being.

But because it is the result which appears as the absolute ground,
this progress in knowing is not something provisional, or problematical
and hypothetical; it must be determined by the nature of the subject
matter itself and its content.
[Science of Logic, With what Must Science Begin?]

That is, the method of Logic is to be determined by the
movement of the categories of logic itself.

As yet there is nothing and there is to become something the beginning
is not pure nothing, but a nothing from which something is to
proceed; therefore being, too, is already contained in the beginning.
The beginning therefore contains both, being and nothing, is the
unity of being and nothing; or is non-being which is at the same
time being, and being which is at the same time non-being.
[Science of Logic, With what Must Science Begin?]

Here is the archetypal disclosure of the identity of opposites:
Being is Nothing! Being, not any particular type or stage
of existence, just pure Being, precisely because it is simply
Being, undifferentiated, undetermined, undeveloped Being, has
no feature, no quality, you cannot be aware of it; in other words
it is nothing.

That which begins, as yet is not, it is only on the way to being.
The being contained in the beginning is, therefore, a being which
removed itself from non-being or sublates it as something opposed
to it. [Science of Logic, With what Must Science Begin?]

And Hegel here shows how this internal contradiction which is
discovered in a concept (in this case the concept of "Being")
is its "motive force", which drives the concept towards
its own negation, i.e. Being is Nothing, is therefore Becoming.

Being in Natural and Social Movements

A social movement exists (in Hegelian language) "in-itself"
before it finds any kind of voice, let alone becomes conscious
of itself and organised under its own banner and program. Before
there is a working class, there are many thousands of wage workers.
Using the methods of bourgeois sociologists we can identify wage
workers or any other category that is subject to measurement as
a "category", but this utterly abstract procedure in
no way demonstrates the existence of a "thing". Sociologists
can dream up any category they like and count its numbers and
measure the attitudes and behaviour of its members but such quantitative
and qualitative measurement means very little. Only when a social
group begins to speak and organise does it come into existence
in any meaningful way.

In the beginning, any concept, social movement, etc., is indistinguishable
from its whole social and historical context. The germ of a movement
lies in the very conditions of its birth.

This stage of a social entity when it exists only in the most
abstract sense of being a category of individuals is called "Being".
It's first act will be precisely the recognition that it exists
but it is Nothing.

Only then does it Become something. During the stage of Being,
there may be momentary "showings" which however lead
to nothing, and each coming together happens in isolation out
of the conditions which exists at a particular place and time.
They just come and go, without exerting any influence of what
follows or what happens elsewhere.

Hegel explains the stage of "in-itself" in personal
and political development as follows:

Thus the man, in himself, is the child. And what the child has
to do is to rise out of this abstract and undeveloped 'in-himself'
and become 'for himself' what he is at first only 'in-himself'
- a free and reasonable being. Similarly, the state-in-itself
is the yet immature and patriarchal state, where the various political
functions, latent in the notion of the state, have not received
the full logical constitution which the logic of political principles
demands. [Shorter Logic §124n]

Or more generally:

Being, as Being, is nothing fixed or ultimate: it yields to dialectic
and sinks into its opposite, which, also taken immediately, is
Nothing. After all, the point is that Being is the pure Thought;
whatever else you may begin with (the I = I, the absolute indifference,
or God himself), you begin with a figure of materialised conception,
not a product of thought; and that, so far as its thought-content
is concerned, such beginning is merely Being. [Shorter Logic §86n, my bold]

The Immediate and Development

I referred above to Being as a "motive force" which
"drives" development. This is a way of visualising the
understanding that, like any other phase of development of the
Logic, Being does not just "terminate" and pass over
into another, but continues within the more developed process,
as one of its aspects.

For example, I remember reading Standford & Roak's book on
group development, which identified seven stages of group development
(Beginning, Norm Development, Conflict, Transition, Production,
Affection and Actualisation). The writers took care to point out
that every time a new member joined the group, and even to an
extent every time you sit down to begin a new meeting, all these
stages had to be recapitulated, even if in telescoped form!

The "materialised conception" which is the beginning
of thinking, does not stop when you first reflect upon it. On
the contrary, it continues unabated. Consequently, all
the moments and stages of the Logic which flow from it continue,
and constitute an inner content of the development from
beginning to end.

Piaget, Historical and Psychological Development

As was pointed out earlier, care must be taken not to slip into
the temptation to impose Hegel's schema of development
onto the material processes under consideration. For example,
Piaget points out in his Genetic Epistemology that the
genesis of concepts in the individual may not only differ from
the historical development, but may in some respects follow an
opposite path:

"In the history of the development of geometry, the first
formal type was the Euclidean metric geometry of the early Greeks.
Next in the development was projective geometry, which was suggested
by the Greeks but not fully developed until the seventeenth century.
Much later still, came topological geometry, developed in the
nineteenth century. On the other hand, when we look at the theoretical
relationships between these three types of geometry, we find that
the most primitive type is topology and that both Euclidean and
projective geometry can be derived from topological geometry.
In other words, topology is the common source for the other two
types of geometry. It is an interesting question then, whether
in the development of thinking in children geometry follows the
historic order or the theoretical order. More precisely, will
we find that Euclidean intuitions and operations develop first,
and topological intuitions and operations later? or will we find
that the relationship is the other way around? What we do find,
in fact, is that the first intuitions are topological. The first
operations, too, are those of dividing space, of ordering in space,
which are much more similar to topological operations than to
Euclidean or metric ones." [Genetic Epistemology,
s. 2]

This emphasises the care that must be taken not to apply these
categories, but only to recognise, or abstract them
from the real development.

In the passage above, Piaget refers to the deduction of the Euclidean,
Cartesian and topological geometry from Burbakian structures;
but these structures represent a very developed Notion of mathematical
form. The most general, abstract mathematical forms always arise
out of the synthesis of "special" or limiting cases
which are always historically prior. I think this is a
general law of development, and reflects the features of Hegel's
Being - Essence - Notion.

On the other hand, Euclidean geometry did not arise from "Euclidean
intuitions" but from the very practical requirement of the
conditions of ancient society to measure land and volume and incidentally
time, and season. This development arose not from the simplicity
of the conceptions involved, but from "Being", "the
real individuals, their activity and the material conditions under
which they live, both those which they find already existing and
those produced by their activity" [German Ideology, Marx]. The requirement for geometrical measure originates in productive
forces which characterised a particular stage of development of
the relationship with Nature, which is in turn reflected across
the whole spectrum of social and cultural activity. Undoubtedly,
the ancient Greeks and Egyptians who founded metric geometry already
had "topological intuitions and operations" in hand,
as is more than demonstrated in their written language.

Likewise, it is hardly surprising that Cartesian Geometry arose
in the period after Galileo's mechanics and cosmology and the
circumnavigation of the globe, during the Thirty Years War. Meanwhile,
topological geometry could only arise on the basis of problems
posed within mathematics itself at the stage at which the whole
body of natural science and industry had arrived at in the nineteenth
century.

It must be kept in mind that Hegel's Logic achieves its
marvelous universality only because of its concrete abstractness.
The history of science and genetic psychology are both huge subjects
in themselves, with or without a consideration of their relation
to Hegel's Logic, and must be the subject of separate study.